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Auto Dealers Use Online Reviews: Local car dealerships are, in this story at least, embracing the online reviews that are written about them and using them as part of their formal marketing. Not only that but they’re engaging in conversations with those reviewers to get more feedback. These dealers see the online reviews written about them as word-of-mouth that needs to be managed since so many people turn to them before buying a car and have found they work when re-purposed in online and other marketing.

The Future of Geo-Location: A good perspective to read on the Pew numbers from a couple weeks ago having to do with adoption of check-in services and apps. Not only does it put those numbers into perspective compared to other media but it also rightly points out that it’s the integration into previous or current behaviors that will wind up determining their adoption and success.

Twitter Places Getting Ready to Stake its Claim: Twitter seems to be experimenting with allowing companies to claim their location on Twitter Places, but how that would integrate with the official Twitter profile that’s maintained is unclear and certain to come up if/when it rolls out. This would compete with Yelp, Facebook and other sites/services, probably leading to a need for a single tool that would allow businesses to maintain all their staked claim locations from a single dashboard, especially as each offering builds out metrics and reporting.

A Loyal Follower is Hard to Find: The promise of some sort of incentive – exclusive looks at new products, one of a kind sales and the like – or the desire to have a problem solved are still the primary reasons someone engages with a company through social media channels. The expectation of such sales lowers for outlets that aren’t social networks. But the risk seems to be greater that someone will break off the relationship if the provided updates either are irrelevant or happen too often, which should warn companies not to deluge the audience with status updates every chance they get.

Online Branded Communities Grow Up: Those companies who have their own branded communities online are increasingly integrating them with their social media efforts. Additionally those communities have more features offered to users that make the experience there more personal (avatars and such) as well as more social such as the addition of bookmarking and other “share” functionality. There’s also a marked increase in the number of communities that offer original editorial content to the members there.

Fortune 500 Nearly Doubles Use of Twitter: Not only are almost twice the number of Fortune 500 companies using Twitter as part of their online marketing compared to last year, but much of the growth came from those in the middle 3/5s of the group.

About the AuthorChris Thilk works on the Client Services team, part of Voce Connect, developing and executing social media strategy. You can follow him at @christhilk on Twitter.